In Apollo, each workspace is an island; workspaces have their own users, permissions, contacts, and so on. It makes most sense for a company to have one workspace, and run different projects under it. We have several customers with hundred of projects -- a number that surprised us.

Each project is also somehow an island: while a workspace can have 30, 40 users, a project typically only have a subset of them with access rights.

While moving things between workspaces is technically near-impossible, moving elements is technically feasible.

Milestones are a central part of Apollo. Sometimes I feel that we should discourage the use of specific dates in tasks, and highlight the fact that the "real" deadlines in projects are set by their milestones.

For example, users forget that tasks might not have a date set for them, and therefore won't appear in the calendar. On the other hand, milestones always have a deadline, and always appear in the calendar of users assigned to that project.

Since milestones are very important, and projects normally have several milestones, we have now added the option where changing a milestone's date will also shift subsequent milestones in the same project.

Sometimes, when you create tasks for your project, you are not entirely sure which task list they will belong to. Or maybe none of your existing task lists is the right one. Sometimes, all you want to do is jump on a project and quickly type 4 or 5 quick points, maybe while you are on the phone with your customer.

This is why we implemented a very quick way of adding tasks to Apollo:

When you create a program, you expect some parts of it to be very popular and wildly used by your users. Then you release it, and... discover that some sections were just not as important as you thought they would be, while some others become absolutely critical.

My Tasks in Apollo is one of those sections: in the initial drawings, it was meant to be just a list of personal tasks. As design went on, it was obvious that it was more important than originally thought as it should obviously display personal and company tasks as well. When Apollo went live, My Tasks proved to be "the" spot where a lot of our users literally lived!

So, to make the long story short: we have recently improved My Tasks quite dramatically. You can now slice and dice tasks in a more flexible way, or filter out the noise and only concentrate on what matters.

I haven't written here in a while. We get a lot of consistent email feedback after posting here, and I have to say we find the communication very gratifying.

One of the features I personally talked about privately in emails a lot was the possibility to run bulk actions on contacts. Before now, if you wanted to change the visibility of 10 contacts, you had no choice but open each one of them. This was time consuming, and hardly a good way to do things.

In my previous blog entry I started listing the new features that made it into Apollo since we came back from our summer break. I also asked you to spot the ones I hadn't listed. I am sure a lot of people simply cheated by looking at Apollo's changelog. For the ones who didn't cheat... here we go!

Software development happens in small steps. Before our deserved summer break (which is just about to end!), we released several small improvements in Apollo. We covered a some of them last week. Here is the rest:

The "notify" section is now collapsed by default

We gave this some thought, and decided that the main means of "subscribing" to a task should be by dropping a comment. This is what happens naturally in several blogs.